Michael spent twelve years leading global strategic business development and highly customer-centered programs for Costco Wholesale, Sam’s Club, and Walmart Stores. In addition to helping grow U.S. operations, Michael also represented Costco, Sam’s Club, and Walmart in over thirty different International country markets. Michael was Costco’s first Representative Director in Japan, and has over 20+ years of Japan retail market leadership experience.

In his current position with Teradata, Michael’s role is to leverage his diverse global retail, marketing, business development, and strategy background and expertise, to shape and drive go-to-market execution of Teradata for Retail Omni-Channel/Connected Customer, Big Data Analytics, and Data-Driven Marketing program strategies and solutions.

Prior to Teradata, Michael led highly targeted multi-channel consumer engagement programs for specialty and vertical retail, and the product development and management of personalized E-Commerce Loyalty platforms for American Express, MasterCard, and the Affinion Group.

Michael holds a Masters in Business Administration from Webster University and a B.A. in History and Communications from the University of Washington.

Michael is a Marine Corps veteran. He served as a commissioned officer, with occupational specialties in Armor and Logistics Management.

Amazon will not miss a beat. The value IS there. As with Costco (the membership program Jeff Bezos used as the model when he launched Prime) people now have an emotional attachment to Prime membership. Like Costco, Amazon Prime membership, at its current price points, remains for the most part inelastic, etc. Members might complain but few will cancel their Prime memberships.

It is a golden time to leverage data and manage technology to speak directly to your best customers with personalized/customized relevance. Building that foundation still starts with optimizing your capabilities to mine POS/purchase history data for the most actionable insights. One can then layer on click-stream data, social and real-time data and the go-to-market art-of-the-possible around integrated customer and merchandise data, etc.
“Ultimately, we know when we deliver the exact right product, experience and storytelling it makes a tremendous difference.” It is really table stakes now for a progressive brand like Nike to put a material strategic emphasis on loyalty and a scalable granular understanding of their top-tier customers by spend, by profitability, by behavior and lifestyle, etc. This is a great call-to-action for retail across the board and a notable example in Nike: Taking the words “off of the wall” and making it happen at scale.

The responses on the graph probably tell the story: "A relevant product/service" leading the way at 77 percent, etc. In this time of (consumer) technology-driven transformation, retailers/retail leadership are looking for the right, relevant technology solutions to help enable many of them to still be here five years from now, etc. The more relevant a vendor can be in truly understanding the customer’s business problems, and aligning solutions with retail pain points (both strategically and tactically), the better in terms of forging those deeper relationships with retail IT buyers. This is where account-based marketing and driving optimal alignment between technology vendor marketing and sales can help.

To follow up on Catherine’s comment, “Walmart has tried before to win an upscale customer with little success”: Over the past 10-15 years Walmart has had a vision in place to expand the base to bring in deeper-pocketed consumers for at least an occasional Walmart store visit, etc. (To include, I recall, sponsoring a full-fashion spread in Vogue magazine touting that “EDLP Back to School Fashion” can indeed be fashionable).
The material differences between those brand extension one-off marketing attempts of the past and a more focused strategy now: 1) Millennials and Gen-Z (and their collective present and future-forward buying-power); 2) Technology ("Amazon Affect"); and 3) Customer Data ("Amazon Affect"). Walmart needs #1 to grow and without the right plans in place for #2 and #3, they can’t bring #1 home at any real scale, etc.
This all feeds in to CEO Doug McMillon’s strategy of helping enable the brand to expand beyond the core customer base by building trust and loyalty through data refinement and enabling an ever-improving shopper experience, and eventually data-enabled personalization. By building this strategy through Store No. 8, Walmart Labs and Silicon Valley, the rest of the organization can keep a focus on meeting the needs of that core customer.

Home Depot has been a good retail example in terms of executing a leadership vision to leverage technology and manage data to improve the customer experience (for both sides of their business: consumer and contractor, etc.). Most specifically on the consumer side: concentrating on how to make the very large box, concrete floor, impersonal shopping experience more inviting to female consumers (who traditionally favored the home improvement shopping experience at the other big box competitor).

I would say at this point in the game that most retailers do not do well enough when it comes to data and storytelling. As time goes by they will do better. They have to.
Yes, there's no ambiguity here: a brand's position on social issues is more important today than ever before. If there is any doubt, if additional quantitative validation needed, just take a poll of consumers born between 1980 and 2000.

This acquisition and the recent news on the expansion of Jet.com Shopping Club does have Walmart targeting urban Millennials with perhaps that much more focus after the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods, etc.

"Future retail success is not a selling model, but a mosaic of customer services."
Above from the IMS article link listed prior to the discussion question ... I agree with this and retailers should be taking a close look their “art of the possible” around a subscription model to help them deliver that present and future-forward “mosaic of customer services,” etc.
Challenge: Not all retailers are positioned to even do a good—never mind a great—job executing a subscription model. But, if a given retail brand can 1) differentiate a subscription value proposition; 2) meet (preferably exceed) the expectations of their member base in terms of executing the delivery of a subscription model, that is a nice way—for starters—to recognize and stay in touch with your most-valuable customers.
What does “Great job” mean? Well the bar is high in terms of offering the “robust” value and execution management of Amazon Prime (originally modeled on Costco’s membership (subscription) model where customer satisfaction in quite high and renewal rates run in the mid 90%).

Well, understanding what is working and why is a good first step for
retailers. Amazon Prime is working (64 percent of U.S. households are Prime members), CVS ExtraCare rewards program is working (80 million active members driving material incremental spend), Costco membership is working (even with all the news and noise about Amazon and Whole Foods and Amazon Prime, Costco still holds membership renewal rates around 90 percent).
The foundational business- and loyalty-driving sensibility that all three have in common is that they all "deliver the goods" and have a brand perception of maximizing member value relative to their respective business models. A good place to start for retailers is maximizing member value. No smoke and mirrors, just data-driven value relevant to the lives and lifestyles of their members. (Costco at this point is perhaps less member data-driven and innovative compared with Amazon and CVS, but they are also sitting on a mountain of customer/member data waiting to be mined for analytic insight to augment their already very strong intuitive sense and tribal knowledge regarding the likes and dislikes of their member base, etc.).
What Amazon, CVS and Costco have going for them into the future is the member data they are capturing with each interface (pre-sale, POS, post-sale) with their members, etc. All three will just get better and better at leveraging the data to personalize and be relevant with their members in the way their members want them to be. They have a good head start on this.

Unlike AI which has universal data-driven potential (across retail formats, categories and demographics) and will continue to produce more sophisticated customer journey and personalization tools, AR's impact on retail looks more limited. That said, I can see Walmart developing next-gen tools and deploying AR to help drive sales and margin in categories like furniture, outdoor patio, jewelry, apparel, etc.

Yes, these next-gen store layouts should connect with the most important core customers now and future-forward: Millennials and Generation Z. Once Walmart learns from the pilots and makes any needed adjustments, predict a broad roll-out.

The difference between eight years ago and now: 1) the ascent of Amazon; 2) the maturation of Millennials. There is no way Walmart can go wrong by enabling consumers to "realize high personalized, one-to-one shopping experiences.”
I attended the Terry J. Lundgren Center for Retailing (University of Arizona) Global Retailing Conference last week in Tucson. Steve Bratspies Chief Merchandising Officer at Walmart gave a presentation centered on innovation in retail. The presentation focused on the two material consumer trends that Walmart sees as keys to their growth now and beyond:

Trend #1: Customers still like the box (the store);

Trend #2: Connecting online and offline wins minds.

Having a plan to address both of these trends for Walmart (and everyone else in retail) is table stakes.

I attended the Millennial 2020 Conference in NYC last week (Millennials, as defined by the conference: Ages 18-34. 80 million strong. Projected $7 trillion in lifetime buying power. The demographic that will determine just what the future of our retail world will look like).
At least based on certain AI presentations I attended at the conference, Gap looks to be moving in the right, future-forward, direction with their virtual dressing room app, etc. Some takeaways from the presentations were:

AI in Commerce: According to eMarketer, led by Millennial shoppers, consumers now expect retailers to harness the power of AI to provide a customized and efficient shopping experience.

Understanding Artificial Intelligence in Commerce: Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85 percent of customer interactions will be managed without human intervention.

Race for Relevance and Engagement via Visual Search: Redshift Research shows that 73 percent of consumers complain about the inefficiencies in text-based search and nearly 75 percent of younger shoppers want visual search functionality to be integrated into their purchase journey (with a 160 percent increase in engagement time for shoppers clicking on visually similar recommendations).

I agree with Ben: The retail “organization needs to be healthy as a whole.” To achieve this at a time of full-scale digital transformation, I believe large retailers have to plan future-forward for at least 20 percent of their sales coming from online (and an even larger percentage of in-store sales being directly customer-influenced by the retailer's digital presence, etc.). Do retailers really have a choice right now, anymore, but to figure it out? To pull out all stops to make their online and digital go-to-market efforts work for them, not against them?